@Thande suggested the other day when I did my Klan America list that he would be interested in a Continuity-of-Government Communist Take Over of the US Government. This one is for you Tom.
Not With A Bang: The Creeping Second American Revolution
1869-1873: Ulysses S. Grant / Henry Wilson (Republican)
1868: Horatio Seymour / Francis P. Blair, Jr. (Democratic)
1873-1877: David Davis / Gilbert C. Walker (Liberal Republican / Democratic)
1872: Ulysses S. Grant / Edmund J. Davis (Republican),
1877-1881: James G. Blaine / Rutherford B. Hayes (Republican)
1876: David Davis / Thomas A. Hendricks (Liberal Republican / Democratic / (National) Workingman's), Newton Booth / Alexander Campbell (Anti-Monopolist)
1881-1883: Marshall Jewell / Elihu B. Washburne (Republican)
1880: Daniel E. Sickles / George V. N. Lothrop (Democratic), Benjamin F. Butler / Marcus M. Pomeroy (Anti-Monopolist / (National) Workingman's)
1883-1885: Elihu B. Washburne / vacant (Republican)
1885-1893: A. Oakey Hall / Richard P. Bland (Democratic)
1884: Philip Sheridan / John A. Logan (Republican), Benjamin F. Butler / John St. John (Anti-Monopolist / Workingman's)
1888: Benjamin Harrison / William W. Phelps (Republican), James B. Weaver / Charles E. Cunningham (Populist), Henry George / Terence V. Powderly (Workingman’s)
1893-1897: Whitelaw Reid / William McKinley (Republican)
1892: Adlai E. Stevenson / Donald M. Dickinson, James G. Field (Democratic / Populist), Dyer D. Lum / Peter J. McGuire (Socialist Labor)
1897-1903: John P. Buchanan / Thomas L. Johnson (Democratic / Populist)
1896: John P. Buchanan / Charles F. Adams, Jr. (Democratic) Whitelaw Reid / John J. Ingalls (Republican), S. Grover Cleveland / William E. Russell (National “Gold” Democratic), S. Philip Van Patten / Benjamin R. Tucker (Socialist Labor)
1900: Seth Low / H. Clay Evans (Republican), Eugene V. Debs / Hutchins Hapgood (Socialist Labor), Melville W. Fuller / Joseph C. S. Blackburn (National Democratic)
1903-1905: Thomas L. Johnson / vacant ("Popular" Democratic)
1905-1907: Seth Low / Louis D. Brandeis (Progressive Union --- Republican / National Democratic)
1904: William J. Bryan / Charles A. Towne (Farmer-Labor Populist), Eugene V. Debs / Voltairine de Cleyre (Socialist Labor)
1907-1909: Henry Ford / vacant (Independent)
1909-1915: Albert R. Parsons / Victor L. Berger (Socialist Labor)
1908: Election Suspended
1912: Albert R. Parsons / Louis D. Brandeis (Independent Socialist Labor / Independent)
1915-1917: Victor L. Berger / vacant (Socialist Labor)
1917-1921: Victor L. Berger / Voltairine de Cleyre (Official “Party Line” Socialist Labor)
1916: Henry George, Jr. / Ross Winn (Non-Partisan Council "Red-White-and-Blue" Socialist Labor)
1921-1924: John S. Reed / Maximilian S. Hayes (Official “Party Line” Socialist Labor)
1920: Hiram W. Johnson / C. Catherine R. O’Hare (“Progressive” Independent / Socialist Labor), John G. London / Allan L. Benson (National “Natsy” Socialist Labor), Voltairine de Cleyre / Morris Hillquit (Left Conference “Red-Black” Socialist Labor)
1924-1925: Maxililian S. Hayes / vacant (Official “Party Line” Socialist Labor)
1925-1929: Charles E. Russell / Henrik Shipstead (Progressive Committee “Right” Socialist Labor)
1924: Emma Goldman / Norman M. Thomas (Left Conference “Red-Black” Socialist Labor), Maximilian S. Hayes / Cyril V. Briggs (Official “Party Line” Socialist Labor)
1929-1937: John G. London / William Z. Foster (National “Natsy” Socialist Labor)
1928: William D. Haywood / James W. Ford (Left Conference “Red-Black” Socialist Labor), Charles E. Russell / Charles E. Ruthenberg (Official & Progressive Committee Socialist Labor)
1932: Ellen Dawson / Arthur C. Townley (“Bill of Rights Front” Independent Socialist)
1937-1940: John G. London / Smedley D. Butler (Official & National “Natsy” Socialist Labor)
1936: Unopposed
1940-1941: John G. London / vacant (National "Natsy" Socialist Labor)
1941-1943: John G. London / William Z. Foster (National “Natsy” Socialist Labor)
1940: Unopposed
David Davis was probably the only man who could have won against the Ulysses S. Grant in 1872. Davis in addition to being a hideously racist prime example of the rotten organ that was the Liberal Republicans was pretty good on Labor issues. His victory massively jacked up the aspirations of the working class for political gains on one end while driving the Republican Party into Chaos, as Grant and his administraton had been all that kept Ben Butler from going off the reservation with his radicalism. Davis would end reconstruction and be rather unmemorable in his milquetoast reform legislation but the forces he unleashed never quite went away.
Radical reform grew fast but in many ways was still slow to build. Agrarian Reformers, Eclectic thinkers and Social Reformers took the political lead for years with the Anti-Monopolists and Populists. Republicans having sent Davis packing spent a decade fighting for patrician One Nation conservatism and civil rights for the freedmen. In the end though, the disjointed and often mutually hostile pushes for reform or radical revolution in regards to the Social Question in the United States began to take hold. The Democrats found some success with Economic Liberalism tied with state and local level social reform under Oakey Hall but Corruption and Economic collapse saw the Party pivot to the Populists in 1897 after neither Tammany Democrats or the Republicans could compensate for the Crash of 1891. John P. Buchanan came into office with an intensive program of agrarian reform and for a time a major faction in the Socialist Labor Party, that sought to support his legislation and considered endorsing him as their predecessors had done to Davis in his failed reelection bid of 1876. But in the end Buchanan turned on them, his interest in Labor was clearly in regards to petty-ante reforms and hopes that attacking the "Jews and the Bankers" would inevitably lead to their uplifting rather then any concrete actions on his part to do so. His harsh use of State forces against strikes and his nativism doomed any chance that the glimmering hope of a united Anti-Republican Opposition Party was doable.
The Socialists turned in good results in 1896 and 1900. In addition years, of hard work in winning local and Congressional Elections allowed things to accelerate. In 1892 and 1896 splits in the Populist Party would see the Socialists win their first governorships in the western Mining States. 1898 would see them come within a few hundred votes of winning the Governorship of Pennsylvania. 1902 would see a Democratic-Socialist Labor Fusion Ticket take New York for the first time. Political Machines and Pinkertons could try as they would to hold back the tied, but after two generations of building up for it the Socialist Labor Party was on the rise and Buchanan's failure to ride the tiger meant that they were about to go on their own. And even where they didn't win, their numbers were rising. And while tensions were to put it mildly "High" as Georgists, Marxists, Radical Agrarians, Syndicalists, Radical Labor, and Anarchists all were sharing a party together, that weakness was turned into a strength by party organizers and treasurers who ignored those pesky problems in the name of getting votes. At the same time, the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor was eaten alive by the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance as it grew and grew with new chapters and massive membership hikes taking advantage of decades of breadcrumbs of labor reform that were, on the whole, actually a rather big piece of pie.
There were those in the Non-Populist Political Parties who saw which way the tide was going, and in 1904 leapt at the chance. Nominating hardliner reformers in an effort to find some sort of patrician solution to the Social Question. But in the end, the election had to go to the House anyway, and it nearly didn't go there way, with a large portion of the shattered Democratic benches still backing the failed economics of the Populists. Seth Low did become President, but within two years he was facing a Socialist Labor Plurality in the House, and not to mention what seemed to be ever-increasing waves of state and local office-holders.
And then it came to a head in the summer of 1907. The anthracite coal miners went on strike for pay and then first though a few distinct STLA actions things went out of control. Wildcat strikes followed. The Socialist Labor Party, though they'd never admit it afterwards, actually tried to stop things, fearing that a failure on the part of the strikes would cripple their long term chances at political gains. But in the end they couldn't. The people stepped up and demanded more, and would have gladly gone on without the SLP had it not come aboard. But the shirkers were eventually either driven out of the temple or converted. Seth Low dawdled as the thing turned into a nationwide General Strike, trying to handle negotiations. There were a few army mutinies at that, and a few cobbled together "Volunteer Companies" of Conservative Militiamen, Pinkertons and students who joined them but in the end it was no use. The country was either about to be swallowed by violent revolt or there could have been a chance, however slim, for peace. And Low, far from a Lincoln or a Czar backed down. He and his Vice President would resign, handing control of the Government to a Secretary of State that had been sworn in not an hour before hand. Henry Ford was no Socialist, but his benevolent treatment of his workers at his motorcar company and his reformer credentials and respected engineering mind made him an acceptable compromise to serve as a non-partisan President overseeing a cabinet that had to be majority SLP. Over his brief few years in office there would be mass negotiation with the Southern States and those of Northern New England where the revolution was weakest. In 1908 for the first time since before Washington, Congress declined to renew the legislation providing for a United States Army, discharging the entire service and handing. A "Second Bill of Rights", a series of a dozen sweeping amendments that would transform the government were approved at an unprecedented Article V Constitutional Convention. Nationalizations with compensation became a policy, though with pennies paid on the dollar. The New State Militias, veering very much towards the Red and the Red and Black saw violence across the country as the Volunteer Companies rose and fell, reaching their peak in October of 1908 when they seized control of 7 state capitals in one day. But it wasn't enough. All the while the Wildcat stream of thought in the SLP was strong, with land redistribution, factory takeovers, housing reorganizations and less savory events like many class and race based lynchings were irregularly carried out from the bottom up.
But in the end the First Stage of the Second American Revolution had been completed, and Socialism was the new law of the land. Albert Parsons would be selected in 1908 to replace Henry Ford by the new Congress having bested several rivals in the heart of the party. But the Anarchist and Democratic components in the SLP were enough, along with mass popular feeling to be uneasy with his 1908 selection with a suspended election. In 1912 he would run, But the 1910 Law on Political Parties made that election an interesting feat. Only Independents approved by the Socialist Labor Party and Socialist Labor Party Members themselves could make it though the process to run. There were those in the Party who disliked this, specifically the Anarchist-influenced factions, and they would often push to open things up further but for years things were mostly settled, with politics being a matter for factions in the SLP who would create their own organizations to push for their own varied takes on the Revolution. Albert Parson's the Grand Old Man of the Party didn't mind, and in fact, embraced the factionalist politics of the party, noting that clearly it was far better to discuss the "Hows" rather then the "Whys" of the past. At his death Victor Burger, even more of a liberal and a moderate pushed even further and for a time one could imagine that the Revolution was bound to stay more democratic, even as Conservative Voices were still blacklisted.
That would start to change under Jack Reed, who by Presidential fiat oversaw a massive reform to the Legal system in the United States, using massed convict labor to build a national road and rail system. Conditions in these camps varied wildly and in them began to enter more and more not just those who had violently stood against the government but those who had done so passively, though protest and speech. The United States Secret Service, having for decades spent time being a Treasury Department agency often with agents loaned out to the Justice Department was given an Independent Station under the President, becoming a source of power and fear for decades to follow. Reed though would die in office after a bout of tuberculosis. Max Hayes and his successor Charles Russell pushed hard to decentralize authority, easy enough to do as the National Judiciary Council grabbed at the chance to overturn Reed's centralization but it wasn't for much.
Eventually the Centralizing, Authoritarian Tendency was back. As War in Europe Broke out there was much talk of a US Revolutionary Intervention. Russell refused. But it was the call to action that a certain faction in the SLP had always been looking for. Reed had just talked about furthering the Revolution, But now, Jack London had a real issue. Vote for him and it would be better for the world. Maybe it would be, but his opponents in the party knew what his other views were, the militarism, the paramilitary violence, the pyramidal systle of leadership that ended with just one man, the views on dissent. But they weren't able to work together as the Anarchist-influenced Left Conference refused to join in a unified front in 1928. By the time they did in 1932 the opposition was castrated and it was too late, and Jack London's hateful, twisted view on the Revolution had finally taken hold, bringing about the second stage of the Revolution, where as long as he lived, opposition was not welcome.